Henrik Karlsson

> Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. —Sam Altman In May 2020, we parked two moving trucks in the harbor and carried everything we owned from one to the other. Johanna, Maud, and I were leaving Sweden, and...

In the writings of mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, there is a recurring discussion of two opposing strategies when confronting problems. One strategy, which he saw as the default among mathematicians and lamented leaning on early in his career, was to “attack problems,” that is, directly work to prove what you have...

In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders would have a thriving social scene of peers to percolate ideas with as they figured out how to build and scale a venture. This was...

Upvotes or likes have become a standard way to filter information online. The quality of this filter is determined by the users handing out the upvotes. For this reason, the archetypal pattern of online communities is one of gradual decay. People are more likely to join communities where users are...

Let’s start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn writing, read great writers, etc. But this is not what parents usually do...

Conversations are streams: they pass by without leaving much behind. But if you add a notebook—if you write down short summaries of what you talk about so you can return to it in later conversations and expand—then you have a landscape for the conversation to flow through, and this changes...

I was born in July 1989, which means I am of the last generation who will remember the time before the internet. The cables and data centers and hyperlinks grew up around me; they grew with me. I find it hard to disentangle the evolution of my psyche from that...